Why is doing what you like – rather than what other people like – such a threatening idea?

Well, that's a bit vague, isn't it? You could apply that one pretty much anywhere; I've personally had arguments along those lines about everything from webdesign to life in general, so let's narrow the field.

Why is writing what you like such a threatening idea?

Hi, my name is Alis and I write badfic. I even named my fic site that, just in case anyone was unsure. I love badfic or, rather, I love bad ideas. Clichés. Gender swap, time travel, alternate universes, mind control, fake marriage, first times, those million and one things that are specific to a particular fandom; I love them all. I love to read them, I love to write them, and I have no shame in my adoration. Nor do I think I'm alone, even if for others it's a secret shame. So here's where I make my stand, where I stick up for the most reviled thing in fandom, and say; it's okay to like what you like.

And I like badfic.

What I don't like is bad writing. Well, bad characterisation, really, because I can tolerate overly-florid or awkward prose as long as my characters remain in character. Fanon or canon, I don't care, just make me believe it. And I think that this is the crux of the matter, because – like I told someone today on fanficrants – anyone can write a good story around a good plot. It takes skill for a writer to take an idea that is old and tired or just plain batshit and weave it into something that works beautifully above and beyond the sum of its parts. These are always my favourite fics, the ones that stick themselves into my brain like glue, maybe because they emphasise the author rather than the idea.

And this is why I write them, too. Because there's nothing that gives me a deeper secret author's pleasure than someone saying something like, The prompts aren't new ideas, but your delivery […] always feels honest. (With apologies to dandysora.) I think maybe it's the authorial equivalent for me of scaling a cliff without ropes. Sure, you can do it with ropes (an 'original' plot), but that almost feels like cheating, somehow.

Of course, it softens the blow when you fall, but… well. Where's the fun in that?

Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original.

I've already stuck this into my del.icio.us list, but yanno what? I think it's so special it needs its own announcements post.

So, everyone, I insist that you go right now to read fandom: it is all coming together in my head! Even if you're only mildly interested in fandom or gender issues, go now; it's some of the best meta I've read for a long time.¹

Endless wanks about OOC aside, it is not only cool but celebrated for women who make fandom to assume men are open to any sexual experience that piques the author's interest. This is way more important than the original canon story […]

And fandom porn isn't just sexual. Fandom is full of emotional pornography. A male character is open to any emotional experience that is convenient (and pleasurable) to the writer. When people talk about fandom aesthetics, or slash aesthetics, it's emotional porn rather than sexual porn that's the litmus test. Fandom takes the idea of arousal and pulls it past the line marked sex, and drags sex along with it.

Quoted From: fandom: it is all coming together in my head

I'm just lamenting the post's not on LiveJournal so I can't pimp it out to metafandom, because, yeah. Needs more exposure IMO.

1. And I'm not just saying that because UIP gets a mention. No, seriously. ^

Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original.

So here's the deal: I was reading fic recently and in my irritation at bad writing came up with the following list of four things that really annoy me. Watch in awe as I attempt to explain why, as well as offer potentially helpful exercises for you (and me) to train yourselves (and myself) out of these terrible habits. Hooray.

(Note that these are specifically targeted at fanfic authors, though some of them at least can apply in a more limited sense to writing in general. Maybe.)

#1. Show, Don't Tell (Unless You Want To)

This is probably the biggest 'rule' in creative writing, and if you can master this one then you've pretty well got it made. In a nutshell, showing is about allowing your readers to experience a story from the headspace of your characters, rather than by being dictated to by an omnipotent god-figure (i.e. you). How to do this? Well, my advice is to simply not assume your readers are stupid (they might be, but let's pretend they aren't). Saying, Sigmund was scared. is assuming stupidity, it's telling. When you're showing, instead of describing the thing itself, you're attempting to describe the surrounding phenomena which demonstrate the thing. Maybe Sigmund's palms are sweaty, or he keeps trying to push his glasses up his nose, or is constantly trying to stand with his back to a wall. You don't need to tell your audience directly that he's scared because your readers can reasonably extrapolate out from his actions that he is.

Showing can be used for pretty much anything, but in (non gen) fanfic its primary function is to describe the emotive reactions of characters. Because by describing the character's reaction you're hoping to elicit empathy in your readers; hope that they will substitute themselves in place of your protagonist, mentally imagining themselves to be having the same reactions and therefore 'feeling' the emotions. You're essentially taking advantage of the capacity for empathy here; humans have this weird brain-quirk where if we're told about emotional stimuli happening to people we care for, our brains start behaving as if we ourselves were experiencing the same thing. Of course, making your readers care for your characters in the first place is another skill all together…

All that being said, there are situations were telling is better than showing. Tolkein was a great shower which has a habit of making his books tediously unreadable for some people, including yours truly. So there's a bit of a balance here. If your characters walk into a room with yellow walls, it's perfectly fine to say so if the yellow walls aren't supposed to be interesting in and of themselves (but remember Chekhov's Gun). If you've been doing a lot of showing, suddenly switching to a tell can also serve as a kind of literary slap to the face; this is the He was totally fucked. 'shock-sentence'.

So it's a bit of a balance, the only way to learn is practice and experience.

Exercises

1. Re-read through a fic you connect with emotionally. Take notes about where the author is showing and where they are telling. How are they using each of these things for effect?
2. Think of a character and an emotion (e.g. Loki was angry.). Now write a drabble¹ describing that without actually ever explicitly stating what the emotion is supposed to be. Focus instead on your character's reactions; thoughts, actions, dialogue. Get someone else to read it and guess the emotion; make sure they tell you why they came to this conclusion.
3. Pick a season. Now write another drabble, set in that season (with or without characters; up to you), without actually outright stating what season you're writing for. Get your helpful friend to guess this one, too.

#2. Listen to Your Dialogue

Dialogue is the other big killer. The thing you have to remember here is that dialogue isn't just narrative that you've assigned to a character. Dialogue is that character speaking, and a quintessential part of characterisation is getting a feel for your character's 'voice'; what they would and would not say. Showing rather than telling comes into play here, too. So, okay, you've been building the UST for the last n thousand words and finally, finally, you're at a resolution. Character A and Character B are gazing wistfully into each others' eyes and the sunset looks like a nice place for a ride and someone opens his mouth to speak and—

Stop.

Before you write anything, before anyone says anything, stop. Imagine that character in your head; if he or she is from a live action source, imagine the voice, too. Now, carefully imagine your character saying the lines you've written out loud. Does it 'work'? Be honest here; can you honest-to-gods imagine your character saying your lines, in all seriousness, without cracking up?

The reason I'm using a romantic example here is because it's the number one place for bad dialogue to creep in. Because, seriously, it's nice that your characters are in love and so forth but unless it's in character for them to be making flowery, vocal declarations of that fact for godssakes don't have them doing it! The other major gotcha here is dialogue that's thrown in to try and explain an action from the canon that the author doesn't like by infodumping reasons the audience understands onto another character ("I never told you because…"). Be careful with that, too. Sure, resolve as many conflicts as you want, but in most cases having two characters just sit down and spew long sentences at each other is not the best way to do it.

Exercises

1. Take a character-defining block of dialogue from your book/movie/TV show/comic/whatever of choice. Strip out all narrative, visual and auditory clues and stage notes until you're only reading the dialogue. How can you identify which character is saying what? Is there a certain way they speak? Certain things they avoid saying? Note your findings.
2. Take a fic you've written in the past and a couple of good friends. Assign your friends a character each and get them to read a segment of your story aloud to each other (you can read the narrative bits). Does it work or sound silly? Do they start cracking up unintentionally?
3. Pick two characters. Write a conversation between them using only dialogue; you can think the narrative to yourself, but don't write it down. Get some friends to guess the characters you've used, and tell you why.

#3. Beware Unadulterated Wish Fulfillment

I know this seems an odd thing to say, since fanfic can pretty much be summed up as wish fulfillment, but there are wishes and there are wishes, if you get my drift.

Sure, it's great that you want to write a different ending for the sixth episode of series three or think that character x and y should get together. There are probably other people out there who agree with you. But your story still needs to work as a story; you still need to pay attention to the canon, no matter how outrageous your idea. Remember also that while your readers might share the same overall idea as you, they're going to vary in their opinions on how it should be executed; what you're trying to do with your story is provide them with something that will make them believe that their desires are actually possible. I've always thought that the greatest praise a fanfic author can get is, This could be a real episode/issue/sequel! Because what that means is that you've not only managed to convey your 'wish' to the readers but have also managed to recreate the feel of the source material. So it's a double whammy; they're seeing their wishes fulfilled in a way that Could Be Real if it weren't for network censors/practical concerns/the government/whatever. That's what you're aiming for.

Exercises

1. Re-read a fic whose idea you've liked, from an author who's competent but whose execution has let you down. I'm sure you can think of one. Why didn't you 'connect' like you wanted to?
2. Re-read a crackfic you've thought was done well. Why do you think it works?
3. Think of the crackiest plot you've wanted to see in your fandom; time travel, mpreg, gender-swap, weird non-human sexual habits, crack pairings, weirder things I can't think of right now. Now write it. Seriously. Even if the end result is supposed to be humorous, pay attention to your characters and try to make the story work. Get feedback. Alternately, for even more of a challenge, try writing the most cliched plot in your chosen fandom. Again, take it seriously; try and produce the definitive story.

#4. You Don't Need Character Assassination

Hate shrines. Death fics. Fics where the formerly sweet and loyal character cheats on the heroine with her two best friends and proceeds to murder her teammates, just so she can be with the Jerk With A Heart Of Gold, or the Stalker With A Crush, or her brother, or whomever else the fan prefers. They're all over the place. People who know nothing about the show or even the genre have heard just how much of the fandom hates the rival love interest.

The writer often claims some other justification for treating the character this way. But it's for a very clear reason. He or she dared to get in the way of their OTP.

Quoted From: Die For Our Ship @ TV Tropes

I don't care how much you hate a character; either write them in character or don't write them at all. No-one is impressed when you deliberately exaggerate a character's bad points purely to turn her (and it's almost always a her) into an object of ridicule for your fic.

The truth of the matter is that you simply don't have to do this. Firstly because the character was obviously annoying enough to start with, since she's managed to put you off-side. Note that I'm not really talking about villains here, but rather protagonist characters to whom you have taken a dislike, generally because they are interfering with your OTP in some way. Character assassination is the cheap and easy way of getting out of a canon love interest, but honestly it's not a good way. Simply not mentioning the character at all is a better option, and one most of your readers are likely to forgive you for. If you absolutely feel you have to dissolve the canon relationship in-fic, then find a way to work that one believably and ave the melodrama for the canon. Relationships in the Really Real World dissolve in mundane and amicable ways all the time.

Again it boils down to a characterisation thing. Bad characterisation is bad characterisation, whether you like the character or not, and your readers will pick up on it.

Exercises

1. Pick a character you loathe from your fandom of choice. Write down all the reasons you hate him or her. Now, the hard part; sit down and write out a list of that character's positive qualities. Anyone writing 'none' automatically fails at writing. If you really can't think of any, look down your list of negative traits and see if any of these qualify as positive (is she clingy, or loyal?).
2. Someone out there likes your hated character. Find them and ask them why; don't judge or argue with their response, just listen.
3. The fun part; write a short vignette from the point of view of your hated character, portraying them in a sympathetic (but in-character) light. Do detractors of the character like it in spite of themselves?

1. Strictly speaking, a drabble is a fic of exactly 100 words. But because the function here is more important than the form, don't worry about going over or under for the purpose of this exercise. ^

Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original.

I decided yesterday that my bugbear in fanfic is a simple thing. There are a lot of things that I don't like – everything from bad writing to RPS – but there's only one thing that really gets my back up enough for me to bother to sit down and write a vehement log post about it. It's a common beast, popping up in every fandom and on even ship, in badfic and in good. A simple thing, yet one so fundamentally disbelief-shattering that once I find it I can't help my fingers twitching over Ctrl+W. What's this scourge, you wonder? This destroyer of fic? This apocalypse of disbelief?

Milky Romantic Nonsense.

If you've read fic, you know what I'm talking about. It's that part of the story – usually halfway through or just before the end – when the UST has been resolved and the obligatory sex scene is looming or just passed. When our two protagonists are gazing dreamily into each others' eyes and the curtains are about to go down on a lifetime of shippy bliss and then, quite suddenly, it hits.

Milky Romantic Monsense.

Don't get me wrong; I loves me a good romance fic. I devour sap like some starving, sap-eating beast. But that's not what I'm talking about. A fic can be romantic and touching without MRN and really, it's all down to the delivery. Because MRN is spoken – it's a symptom of dialogue (albeit occasionally internal dialogue) – and it only affects a very specific sub-set of characters.

It's not just about the words. It's not just about loudly and frequently profession undying love or making queasy statements about how Character X has "always loved" Character Y but been too terrified to admit it. You can do all those things, and on some characters that's completely, well, in-character. But on others it isn't, and there always seems to be an inverse ratio, here; the less likely a character is to start sprouting MRN in canon, the more likely they are to do it in fic.

I was thinking about this when I came to the realisation that MRN isn't simply a symptom of bad writing. It's a product of the whole slash (fandom?) aesthetic. Even when MRN doesn't crop up, the resulting scenarios are quite often functionally similar; boy meets boy, boy secretly lusts after boy, boy is convinced some personality trait of his makes him unlovable and angsts about it, boy discovers boy does love him after all, everyone lives happily ever after. It's only the competence of the execution that softens the realisation. It's so prevalent and so under-the-radar that I didn't even consciously realise it until I read this post the other day. In a nutshell, giandujakiss is talking about the difference between fanfic romance and mainstream romance. Fanfic, she says – whether het or slash – fetishises not only the power of the sexually 'submissive' partner but the whole concept of male vulnerability.

When you think about it like that, the distinction is so obvious.

Don't take my word for it? Go back and re-read almost any fanfic and I swear to you this will be true to the point that the exceptions to it only emphasise the rule. It's the whole point of UST, which is often the most emphasised element of fic, even over and above the resolution (the Japanese are the most acutely aware of this, which is why most shoujo stories end when the hookup finally happens).

And this is where we get back to MRN, because the more controlled and powerful a (usually male) character is, the more enjoyment is derived from displaying his inner vulnerabilities. Most of these stories unfold by having that character initially regard his affections for another as a 'weakness'; at the end of the story the perception morphs into a realisation that this emotional vulnerability is actually a strength when shared with the object of his reciprocal desire. This might not be a particularly revolutionary revelation apart from this one statement:

Fandom is a female space.

That's not to say there are no guys in fandom, only that the momentum behind the fen is female-driven. Most of the authors, artists and creators are women and they produce content for female audiences. The reviewers are women. The editors are women. The fanzine publishers are – you guessed it – women. More than that, for a lot of women the fandom is their 'safe place'; somewhere they can express themselves without fear of (male) ridicule. Of being branded a freak or a slut. And maybe that's why so much of the fen revolves around sex and relationships, because there are so few places where women can discuss these issues without male interference. The guys that are around learn not to ridicule their female fellows for their desires, and in return they're usually tolerated.

So, I ask myself, what makes the fen's aesthetic different from that of other 'female spaces' like, say, your aforementioned romance novels or Dolly magazine? Interesting question, not sure if I have a decent answer for it other than a gut feeling (after all, I read one and not the other and there's gotta be a reason for that). Maybe it's that 'traditional' female spaces in literature are those which have been given to us by men; they're dictated by what men 'expect' us to like, the bits men don't want (q.v. non-existence of a gaming magazine targeted at women, for example). The fen is different because it steals something from a male-dominated space and remakes it in a female image. It's the thrill of, "If we ruled the world, this is how it would be."

And it's interesting that a genre that is almost universally defined by its rejection of male expectations for women has essentially produced from itself a female expectation of men. Or at least a model of masculinity that is idealised by women, and it's a glass darkly compared to the male-idealised model of the same thing; prizing emotional and physical strength, independence, desire, vulnerability and confidence. It's assertive… but it's not aggressive.

Because my challenge for the month is to relate everything back to Superman, I'm going to do that here. Remember when Superman Returns came out and there was that kerfuffle when Bryan Singer made some comment about the titular character being seen through the eyes of a woman? I always found this comment extremely odd, and more than a little bit patronizing. Sure, the film was packed with mancandy but anyone who thinks this is the exclusive product of a gay director obviously hasn't read the comics recently. No matter what angle I look at the Superman-Lois-Clark non-euclidean love triangle from, there's no way I can interpret this as being "from a woman's perspective" and, honestly, the main reason why I – and a lot of female fen – find the whole relationship distasteful is because it paints women in such a bad light. It reminds me of that 70's Superman story where said character is under the impression that he has to chose one persona to live in. He spends a week as "only Superman" and a week as "only Clark" in order to sort the problem out; during Clarkweek, he drops his Clark Kenting¹ and, well, quite frankly acts like a dick. The net result of this is that Lois is infatuated, as expressed by her sudden desire to drop around randomly and cook him dinner. Not only does this story, I think, pretty much encapsulate everything I don't like about 'traditional' Clois but quite frankly scares me because, obviously, there are men out there who think that this is the kind of behavior that women find appealing.

And this is where the fen is interesting, because the male characterisations it produces – ones we assume by default are appealing to women because that's who they're both by and for – are worlds away from this. Sure, we're not in the 1970's any more but I'm not at all convinced that – middle-class intellectuals aside – common perceptions of masculinity, and therefore by default what women find desirable, have moved on very much.

So this is what the fen being a 'female space' means to me. The ubiquitous nature of MRN is nothing more than a backlash against 'manly man' stereotypes which women find inadequate. And while I'd never be so hypocritical to assert that men should be validating their identities based on female expectations any more than the reverse should be true…

It's still an interesting observation.

1. This is back in the days where Superman is assumed to be the 'real' personality and Clark is a disguise. How vogue this interpretation is at any one time tends to depend on the author, and is currently somewhat out of fashion (or at least de-emphasised, since Lois and Clark have been married in the comics since the 90s). ^

Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original.